Sachi Doctor is a woman of striking beauty . . . like, stop you in your tracks beauty. And yes—her long curly hair, wide eyes, and milky brown skin have something to do with it—but it’s actually her essence that draws you in. There’s a knowingness in the way that she presents herself to the world. A knowingness that life is filled with uncertainty, and suffering, and beauty, and everything in between.
Sachi’s company, Elemental Alchemy, offers holistic health education and handcrafted wellness products out of Oakland, California. Sachi comes from a lineage of Indian healers and doctors, and she has used the wisdom of her ancestors in both Eastern and Western medicine to shape her understanding of health. She blends Ayurvedic principles, yogic philosophy, and plant-based nutrition to help individuals reconnect with their inner wisdom, reclaim their story, and restore balance within. Sachi mentions that if there was more familiarity with the term, she would like to be called a “self-awareness facilitator.” As she describes it, “Not teaching anyone. Not telling anyone. But hopefully being there to sit next to someone as they become more familiar and comfortable sitting in their own experience.”
At the beginning of our conversation, Sachi and I are mirrors to one another as we describe our inherent sensitivities to the world around us. Both of us trust easily, empathize quickly, and have had many experiences in which we lost ourselves in someone else’s emotional experience and story. Sachi questions the tendency to do so: “What is a healthy amount of connection? What is actually true? And what is all this stuff I am projecting onto an experience or a person to make it feel safe given the amount of energy and draw [that] I’m feeling?”
Sachi was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when she was 9 years old. As a child, Sachi remembers there being “a lot of information that doctors share with you. If you do this, you’ll have this outcome. If you feel this way, then it will result in X, Y, and Z. And when you don’t have that outcome, when the story doesn’t look like they say it will, you are very much at a loss. There are these models and systems of health that are true for particular people, but [they] don’t necessarily apply directly to every individual.”
She continues:
“I have so much respect for the insights and testing [of Western medicine that] allow us to see our bodies on a cellular level, [but] we have to be able to take that information and balance it with our actual experience as well. So that, when we follow a diet or a protocol that says we’ll end up in this particular state, and we don’t—there is space to trust ourselves. That that’s okay too.”
Sachi is able to look back at her life and her experiences with this broadened lens and perspective. However, it was through her own journey with trusting the intelligence of others rather than her own innate inner wisdom that have led her to where she is today. Sachi shares,
“I think we create fixed frameworks, oftentimes toward our own detriment. We mold them out of cement—like this is what life looks like. This is what health looks like. This is what I should feel like. And [I am curious] about how we can make that framework out of Lego pieces. And I say Lego pieces because you know, twigs are very romantic and earthy . . . but twigs can also fall apart at the slightest force. We want the deliberate nature of constructing a framework out of Lego’s where it’s stable. Yet when new information comes your way, you have the choice to rearrange it and create a new window or a new room.”
When Sachi was younger, she had a desire to become a psychologist. However, as she was diagnosed with a chronic illness at a young age and experienced life through a sensitive framework, she was told by her teachers and mentors that her heart was too big for that type of profession and that she wouldn’t be able to hold the container or the boundaries without it impeding on her own health and vitality. Reflecting on this idea, Sachi notes,
“I internalized the story that sensitivity was something that was happening to me and was something that wasn’t good. So the exact thing that, that gift I was given that allowed me to connect to my experience, was something that suddenly became bad or wrong, which immediately disconnected me from any sort of gut intuition or instinctive feeling I had about my [own] gifts.”
Years later, Sachi learned to harness her sensitivity into super powers through her work as a holistic health educator. Based on her own personal life experiences, she has created a framework for working with clients called the Trinity of Self-Awareness. The three steps to the Trinity of Self-Awareness include:
Step One: Know Thyself
“The first step is just to be able to see that you are unique and that you’re unique in these particular ways and that’s why these patterns exist in your life.”
“Can we look at ourselves with childlike curiosity? Can we examine the choices we’re making or the tendencies with just this like ‘Wow! What is this thing that’s happening?’ And it may be something that we feel that’s painful. But still to be able to step again outside of the attachment of the story or whether it’s good or bad and to just watch it. That’s where we begin to know ourselves.”
Step Two: Hone Thyself
“The second step is where we get to step out of the role of the narrator to the author . . . Empowering oneself to choose the stories you’re telling . . . To choose those [stories] carefully, in a way that creates space for the multitudes of oneself and also supports us in the unfoldment of the things that we are wanting.”
Sachi continues with a tangible application:
“One of the ways to do this is to look at core desires. So someone may say ‘I want a promotion.’ And it’s like okay . . . what is under that? What is it that you really want? . . . The fundamental core of what it is that’s motivating you. And in that we open up our experiences to all these other things and these ways of fulfillment that may not look like they once did or may not be as limited as they once were.”
Step Three: Trust Thyself
“We live in a time of such information overload and it’s not to say to deny information and just recreate maps and models for yourself every day. But when you take in information, to have some discernment about what about this is true for me and works for me, and what of it doesn’t? . . . Nothing is fixed. Everything is malleable and fluid and ever-changing. So really stepping into living in gray and being comfortable with that.”
